Watering the Seed of a New Idea

Well, it looks like we may have figured out a new and unique way to be a bit more prepared.  I've been working on the food aspect of surviving the ZA, but what about water?  I'm not keen on rows of barrels filled with water filling my basement or other storage areas, and I'm not keen on buying water.  Besides, bottled water is often pretty gnarly, and I don't recommend using it unless you're in a pinch.

So, we're going to prevent pinching.

As many of you know, our house has no nose.  The nose got ripped off by The Drunk well before we bought the house, and there just hasn't been money to put it back on as yet.  We're working on getting the money, but it's slow going.  We can survive without porches quite well, but living with debt is mentally crippling, so debt comes first.  So, we were discussing sticking a geothermal sink under the front porch when we build it.  If the lights go out in the city, and it's winter, I want the house to stay above freezing enough to not freeze all our pipes, and for us to get so cold, we die.  A brief exploration has shown that we very likely can legally put a geothermal sink in on our land.

So, now we're talking geothermal in the porch (when the porch gets put back on the house), which got S.D. thinking about digging other deep holes in there, too.  S.D. often would like to fight the Kaiser on our lot, and I keep not letting him, no matter how well his thoughts are planned.  Back to the porch.  Instead of digging deep holes, I thought about the size of garden we're going to lose when that porch goes back on, and the size of the foundation of the porch in general.  I then thought, well, well, well, why not a cistern?  We could create a rainwater collection system with shut off and filtration to enter a cistern contained under the porch!  

The floor of the front porch would have an access point to said cistern for access of cleaning and maintenance, and the foundation could easily contain it.  I'm betting that it would contain a geothermal sink AND a rainwater cistern, with a minimal amount of deeper digging.  The current garden rain barrels would work fine to capture the first few minutes of a rainfall to catch the most contaminated water until the shut-off shunts the cleaner water into the filtration system of the cistern.

I've started to think this over well, and I figure this would be a great way to supplement in good times and supply in the ZA.  Without taking up all the room in the basement to do it.